Mobility Map

Inspiration

After a conversation about how to create a better way to conduct discussions online centered around transportation issues, something beyond a forum where information is shared in real time and associated with geographical data, something that could produce reports about what issues concern people, and be central and scalable enough to be applied in any transportation network, we came up with Mobility Map!

How it works

People sign in using Facebook or Twitter, make their way to the form, and start posting "Hints" about transportation around the map. Categories help them narrow down the purpose of the hint and allow others to easily search the map for relevant discussions.

Challenges I ran into

Using Shareabouts, Wilson and I have discovered the woes of hacking into a platform that uses many levels of abstraction: Django, Handlebars, Backbone, Postgres, Postgis, etc etc...

Also, VTA data is not very easily accessible. A lot of it is directly stored as variables in javascript files and not in any template forms.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our constant momentum, and the level of collaboration this project has led us to, not to mention our knack for hacking into complicated software, figuring it out, fixing bugs, and making it work for us.

What I learned

Some VTA data is hard to pull, but also that people are interested in being able to connect with others online about transportation.

What's next for Mobility Map

Scaling! Also, numerous niche features to help people participate, such as upvoting comments in realtime, a user interface for signing up for data reports, and icons that don't fold behind one another on the map.